


leave a light on

by isawet



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Dark Emma Swan, Dark Swan Arc, F/F, Gen, Not Canon Compliant, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-04
Updated: 2016-07-04
Packaged: 2018-07-20 01:23:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7385344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isawet/pseuds/isawet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emma and Regina, before Dark Swan and during.</p><p>(Not canon compliant)</p>
            </blockquote>





	leave a light on

**Author's Note:**

> I don't have a beta for this one, so please excuse careless errors, typos, etc. I'll fix things as I become aware of them.

“I’m thinking about getting my own place,” Emma says one morning. She thinks Snow will take it better in the morning, after a night where her little brother hardly cried at all and after a quick breakfast with Henry, very family, much wholesome, et cetera. So sweet Emma could see it in a Sears window, come Christmas. Snow drops her coffee mug and it shatters, sending huge shards skittering across the linoleum. “It’s better for the kid,” Emma powers through, “get his own room.” And so you and David can get your own room, she thinks darkly, because Snow may be pregnant, but Emma’s been pregnant too and she knows how hormones get. At least Snow has a husband instead of a felon roommate named Sue Ellen. And a real bed instead of the perpetually damp bottom bunk, mold under the mattress.

“Oh Emma,” Snow says, her eyes big and wet. Emma fidgets uncomfortably. 

“It’s not cool to live with your parents,” she says, hoping her sideways admission of familial acceptance will cut off the feelings fest before it begins. “so I hear, haha.” Snow does not _haha_ back and Emma shifts on her feet, awkward. She steps on a piece of Snow’s coffee mug and it crunches under her boot. “Okay, well--”

“Have a good day at work,” Snow says, sensing Emma’s resistance. Maybe it’s a mom thing, Emma thinks, she can definitely tell when Henry’s done talking about his father. But that’s because he pats her on the arm and says _Mom, it’s enough for today. Hot chocolate?_ Maybe Snow deserves more mom points for gleaning emotion from Emma’s weak, forced laughter. Snow steps forward, going for a hug or maybe a kiss, and Emma retreats before she can stop herself, bumping into the counter.

“Yes,” she says, turning to put her cup away and avoid her mother’s face. “I will.”

//

Killian walks her to work and she dodges his goodbye kiss, tries not to notice his hurt. She gives out four parking tickets on the way in and spends the rest of the morning throwing a rubber ball against the wall, leaned back in her rolly chair. She figures it’s okay as long as David doesn’t understand what a cliche it is. His phone keeps going off, short buzzes on the desktop that she can hear through the open office door. She wonders if she should insist on getting the office, since she is the sheriff, but being a deputy in everything but name suits her for the time being. Saviour and Mother are big enough responsibilities for someone who had to set up automatic deposits so her bills get paid on time.

Eleven rolls around, the clocktower clanging, and David emerges from the office. He’s got ink stains on his fingers, and Emma could hear the pen clicking in a staccato rhythm all morning. Paperwork must blow for a guy that figured his future would be sword-fighting and horse wrangling. “Your mother says you’re looking for a new place.”

Emma lets her feet thump down from where they’d been propped up, feeling less vulnerable with her weight centered under her. “I’m not looking. I’m thinking about looking.” She sounds too defensive, even to her own ears, and she stands abruptly. “I have a lunch… thing.” Snow would have called after her, called her back, but there’s background there, with her and Mary-Margaret. David and Emma have no background, and he just nods as she leaves.

//

“I brought you--” Emma announces, barging into Regina’s office. Regina looks up at her entrance, de facto irritated at the intrusion, fork frozen halfway to her mouth. Looks like salad, just a little bit of dressing on the corner of her mouth. Smells like balsamic vinegar. “--salad,” Emma finishes lamely. “Or not.” She looks down at the plastic container, bought from the grocery store run by these three annoying--hold up, do the Little Pigs run a store that has a butcher counter? The line of thought freezes her. 

Regina’s voice breaks through. “Did you get anything for yourself?”

Emma jerks. Regina’s face is a softer now. Not affection, but a little less glaring hatred. “Uhh…” Actually she’d gotten a little frozen looking at the selection of premade salads. Who knew there could be so much variance in what Emma considers to be essentially collections of lawn trimmings.

“Try it,” Regina suggests, “if you don’t think something that isn’t deep fried cheese won’t throw your whole digestive tract out of balance.”

Once Emma had been at a foster home that padlocked the fridge shut, and she kept missing dinner time because the walk to school was too far and she didn’t have fare for the bus. She’d stuffed her pockets with the bags of baby carrots the school gave out as a free snack, digging them out from the garbage cans when no one was looking. When she’d gone to the next home and had a chicken sandwich she was violently ill for a day, scrunched up around cramps and irritating the new family immediately by occupying the bathroom.

“Vegetables aren’t the enemy,” Regina says, faintly amused, and while she doesn’t exactly pull out the chair opposite her desk for Emma, she does reach into a drawer and withdraw a can of orange soda, which is an invitation of itself. 

Emma brightens and settles into the chair, tossing the salad to the side in favor of popping the tab on the soda and draining it dry in long swallows. The warm bubbles burn her throat and she pulls a face. Regina is watching her. “What?”

“Nothing,” Regina says, going back to her own lunch. “You looked like Henry for a moment.”

“Like you’d ever let Henry drink soda.” Emma considers crushing the can against her forehead just to see Regina’s reaction. Instead she crumples it in one hand and tosses it across the room. It clangs into the plastic recycle bin and she gives Regina a triumphant look.

Regina rolls her eyes. “Of course Henry drinks soda.” Emma arches an eyebrow, higher and higher, until Regina relents. “On special occasions. And, I’m sure, whenever he’s with you. Or the _Charmings_.” Her lip twists in disgust at the very mention of their name. 

“Oh no,” Emma says, “never. Only water bottled by virgin monks from the deepest rivers of Siberia.”

“Siberia,” Regina repeats. “the deepest rivers of--” she stops, unable to fully repeat Emma’s ridiculous lie. 

“Scuba diving virgin monks,” Emma says, completely straight-faced, and snaps the lid off the salad. She takes a bite and pulls a face. Dry grass, that’s all salad is, and there’s not even chicken or cheese in this one.

“Eat your salad, Miss Swan.”

Emma frowns at it. “It’s _boring_.”

Regina reaches down for a moment and comes back with a small tupperware, a small glass cylinder with a rubber lid. “Here.”

Emma opens it and sniffs it. Balsamic vinegar. “Is this salad dressing tupperware? They make classy salad dressing tupperware?”

“You think my tupperware is classy?”

Emma pours the dressing over her salad and stirs it with a plastic fork Regina gives her. “It’s glass, it’s classy.”

“Hm,” Regina replies absently, looking over a spreadsheet. Emma squints at it for a second and then decides, no matter what it says, it’s not going to be something she cares about. At Regina’s elbow, there’s a rectangular container with baby carrots, and it reminds her of her foster family again. “You’re preoccupied today,” Regina comments.

“Yeah,” Emma says. She frowns at the baby carrots and takes another bite of salad. It’s better with Regina’s dressing, but Emma would kill for a grilled cheese.

Regina follows her gaze. “They’re carrots, Emma. Root vegetables?”

Emma picked the padlock in the home, once. It took days of practice at night, her ears pricked for footsteps, her eyes straining in the dark. On the weekends she walked to the library and read books about locks. It was the first lock she ever picked by herself, and it was mostly just to see if she could. When it clicked open she’d almost whooped in victory. Instead she took a can of orange soda from the bottom shelf and drank it on the fire escape. Later they’d figured her for it, snitched out by the other girl that had been staying there. That had been less fun. “I had a foster person who used to dream about glass tupperware,” she says. “she said that if she ever had money for glass tupperware, that’s how she’d know she made it in life.” She rubs a scar on her knee absentmindedly, through her jeans. 

Something in her tone makes Regina pause. “And how would you measure success? White wedding with the pirate?”

Emma ignores the dig at Hook, mild by Regina standards. “Guac money,” she says seriously. Regina blinks at her.

“What?”

“Guacamole money. When they say ‘extra charge for guac’ and I can just be like ‘yeah, you know what? Gimme two.’ _That’s_ financial success.”

“Of course. Silly, me, aiming for a full college fund for Henry.”

Emma wonders if Regina has another soda hidden in her drawer, and if so, how she can finagle getting it before she has to go back to work. “As a college student, he’s definitely going to come down on the side of guac.”

//

When she gets back to the office David is standing by her desk, frowning at the papers in his hand. When he sees her he smiles, love in the way his eyes crinkle at the corners. It makes Emma uncomfortable, clicking her nail under the tab of the orange soda (three seconds of sad facing at Regina, one mournful scrape of the plastic fork against the salad container). “Whatcha got there?”

“They’re for you,” he says, and offers them to her. She takes them: six printouts for apartments and houses for rent. “maybe… don’t tell your mother right away I gave them to you.”

Emma snorts. “Deployed to convince me to stay?”

David looks sheepish. “She likes having you close. _We_ like having you close.”

“Your place is too close,” Emma says. She automatically sorts the printouts by price and starts with the cheapest. Apartment that she knows for a fact shares the grounds with the convent. Pass. She drops it and looks at the next one. It’s for an apartment above the fishing store down at the pier, and comes with a place to tie up a houseboat. “Trying to set me up with Killian?”

“What?” David tilts his head to read the listing, then snatches it out of her hand. 

Emma reaches for it, “Hey, that apartment looks nice. Great natural light. Good view.”

David scrunches it into a ball. “You don’t want to live next to the pier,” he says. “it’s… fishy. Has the fish smell.”

Emma leans over the desk, almost laughing as he holds the paper away from her. “Don’t let Ariel hear you--” she over-balances him and they tumble down. Emma bangs her hip on the edge of the desk.

“Sorry,” David says from where he’s sprawled over her legs. He sits up and smoothes out the paper. “I know I shouldn’t be so protective. You’re a fully grown woman, and you can make your own decisions.” He makes a face like he’s swallowed and is currently choking on a lemon. “If you want to live with Hook--”

Emma snorts. “The only guy I’m interested in living with is Henry.” She scoops up the other four listings and looks at one at random. It’s a small, described as a cottage, on the edge of the forest. Because what she really wants is to be Robin Hood’s neighbour. Charades with Marian and Killian. She tosses the pages aside and stands, groaning at the flash of pain on her hip. She offers David a hand up and he takes it. “I’m not trying to move out tomorrow.”

“We’ll figure it out,” he says, and he is protective and supportive and reassuring in all the ways Emma has dreamed about since she was old enough to understand what _father_ and _family_ and _home_ meant. She’s called David _Dad_ before, and it shouldn't be so hard to do it now. But it is, and the moment passes while she’s struggling with it. 

“Yeah,” is what she says instead, and they do paperwork until five.

//

She broaches the idea to Henry after dinner, while they’re walking down to Granny’s on a milkshake run. He kicks a rock thoughtfully. “Aren’t you happy to live with your real parents?”

It’s a complicated question, even if it shouldn’t be, so she avoids answering it. “Don’t you want your own room?”

Henry’s brow furrows. “I thought breaking the curse would give you your family back. Your real family. The book said that’s what you’ve always wanted. A real family.” He sounds as young as he did when he knocked on her door.

Sometimes Emma really hates that book. “I have my real family,” she says, slinging an arm around his shoulder. “next step is a real room.” She grins at him and he returns it.

“Maybe a real dog?” he suggests, and she ruffles his hair.

“Don’t push it, kid.”

//

Emma has been giving the responsibility of carrying Henry’s Civil War diorama from the back of the Beetle to Regina’s living room, maybe fifty feet, and it’s possible she’s taking it more seriously than the task necessitates. 

“Come on,” Henry urges from where he’s unlocking the door. 

“Don’t rush me,” Emma says, just having conquered the step up from the road to the sidewalk. The tiny mock battlefield is bulky and slippery in her gloved fingers, and there’s just no way she’s going to drop Henry’s project right in front of Regina Mills, Super Mom. 

“Eggplant Parmesan,” Henry says in the same tone someone might use to offer illicit substances. He takes a deep, exaggerated inhale. Emma’s heartbeat quickens, and something must show on her face because he grins and clomps into the house, shouting a greeting.

Regina appears in the doorway, softly backlit by the environmentally friendly bulbs Emma helped change two weeks ago, standing on a kitchen chair until Regina bitched at her to use ‘the proper step-stool, Miss Swan.’ She clicks down the front steps and over to Emma, now nearly halfway there. Emma pulls back, suddenly protective of this thing Henry has allowed her, a physical manifestation of trust in such a little thing, a posterboard with plastic men hotglued to dirt she helped him get from the yard, tiny rocks sticking under their nails.

Regina’s eyes flash, fire rising and then quenched by pure force of will. “Will you be joining us for dinner or should I check back on your progress after Henry goes to bed?” For Regina, it’s fairly friendly, and includes an invitation for eggplant parm. Emma decides to reciprocate. 

“He left his lunchbox in the car.” Regina opens the door with only the faintest hint of a sneer at the car, and emerges with Henry’s lunchbox, brightly colored in Spiderman’s uniform pattern. Her look goes distinctly fond, and they share a quick glance between mothers, their son not yet old enough to be too cool for sandwiches wrapped up in superhero polyester. 

Emma makes it up the steps, keeping the project obsessively level, and walks backwards into the house. It hits her like a physical force, heat and food and family. Underneath, the lightest hints of winter cider, apple spiked by cinnamon and and brandy. Regina passes her in a blue wrap dress, tasteful lipstick, classy heels. A year ago, Emma would have been in a tanktop with coffee stains, blue jeans that hadn’t been washed for two weeks. Tonight she’s in a crisp button up shirt under a soft sweater that matches her eyes, the collar starched and bleached. Her paints are tailored to hug her waist and legs. She suspects, with growing certainty, that Regina has altered her farther than dropping a few memories of Henry’s first steps that morning by the town line, just before New York. 

//

“This isn’t working, is it love?” Killian’s smile is sweet, supportive. Emma pulls away from their kiss.

“What?” She leans back against the couch, curled up with her legs tucked under her, leaning into Killian’s side. A baseball game rumbles in the background, washes the dark room in bright LED colors. “What are you talking about?”

“I can tell when a girl isn’t sure.” Killian frowns. “I’m not one to pressure something… unwanted.”

Emma’s irritation flares. “How about I decide what is and isn’t wanted.” She leans away from him, frowning.

“You’re my true love,” Killian says. Emma blows a sigh. She knows, already. “When we make physical love I want there to be equal emotion between us.”

“Pro tip,” Emma says, running her mouth like she does when she’s defensive. She’s never taken rejection well. “The phrase physical love will pretty much ensure nothing physical ever happens.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow.” Killian stands and wiggles his iphone at her. “With my hand contraption.” He holds up his hook, grinning.

“Whatever,” Emma mutters, looking away. Her arms are crossed tightly across her chest. “Might be busy tomorrow.”

“With what?”

“Official police business,” Emma lies, badly. Killian dips and kisses her again. Emma hates the way her body turns into him.

“I’m not giving up on you, Emma Swan.”

“Bye,” Emma says.

Killian shuts the door behind him. Frustrated, Emma throws a little pillow across the room.

“Those are ornamental,” Snow says from the doorway, “not projectiles.”

“Everything’s a projectile,” Emma says, slouching low and throwing an arm over her eyes, “if you try hard enough.”

//

Emma’s not sure how she got roped into this, except that Henry needs something for the bake sale and used some kind of guilt-fu to get her and Regina to agree to make it for him. Now she’s standing barefoot in Regina’s kitchen helping Regina frost funfetti cupcakes.

“Help is a strong word,” Regina sneers.

Emma rolls her eyes. “I nixed mini apple turnovers, that’s plenty help.”

“Funfetti,” Regina says, and it’s an even balance between appalled mourning and furious disgust.

Emma pours her another glass of wine to dull the pain. “See, I’m all kinds of helpful.”

Regina harrumphs, even if it is in a dignified, royal sort of way, but she takes the glass. Their fingers brush, and Emma drains her own glass, pulling a face. “There’s that beer you like in the fridge,” Regina says, turning her attention back to making perfectly coiffed rows of cream cheese frosting.

Emma perks up. “Tecate?”

Regina’s hands freeze, wrapped around the ridiculous plastic frosting tool she’d already had on hand. Emma holds her breath, hopeful, but after a second Regina starts frosting again, clearly bent on ignoring Emma. Emma sighs. Someday she’ll get Regina to snap and call her a peasant. She yanks the fridge open and moves all the vegetables she doesn’t recognize to the side, reaching to the back to find three chilled bottles of some expensive fancy IPA, flavoured with tangerine. She pulls one out and makes a face. 

“You can’t chug this,” she says, disapproving.

“Good,” Regina says, bent close to eyeball perfection in the shape of tiny cakes. Emma looks at her, the concentration lines around her eyes, the little dent above her lip. “Good,” Regina says again, “maybe you’ll taste something for once.” Emma sidles up behind Regina, eye on one of the finished cupcakes on the plate behind her. “Don’t even think about it, Miss Swan.”

Emma sighs, big and grumbly, “I thought you wanted me to ‘taste something’.”

“These are for Henry,” Regina says. “If you’re so eager to eat, you can start on making dinner.”

Emma props her hands on her hips. “Why would I help make something I can’t even eat?”

Regina sighs. “That was an invitation, Emma.”

“Oh.” Emma scuffs a toe on the immaculate floors. “Okay.”

“Unless you have a date with the pirate?”

“Ugh,” Emma says, opening the fridge again to give her hands something to do. “That’s a strong no.” She pulls out a bag of something that looks like lettuce, shakes it. “Salad?”

Regina doesn’t look up. “Not unless you enjoy the taste of raw cabbage.”

Emma looks at the bag consideringly. “With enough ranch…”

Regina straightens and turns, offended. “There is no _ranch_ in this household.”

“I think I have some in the car,” Emma says, and Regina closes her eyes to take a steadying breath.

“Peel potatoes,” she says, and all things considered she’s being more patient with Emma today than she’s ever been, made cheerful by Regina standards by Henry asking her for help, so Emma tosses the cabbage back in the fridge and goes hunting for the potatoes and a peeler.

Emma loses herself in the easy chore, scraping long peels away and dropping them in the sink, the skins turning her fingers dusky brown. There’s a half-faded memory itching in the back of her skull, Henry picking the music and slicing the mushrooms, making dinner together in New York. The memories are bittersweet, beautifully fake but fading, like a nice dream she had once, or a favorite movie she watched many times as a child.

//

Emma goes home with a (glass) tupperware of golden oven baked potatoes with rosemary and olive oil because she peeled too many, after Henry lets her give him a forehead kiss goodnight even though he’s probably too old to want one, and Killian is lying on her couch with his shoes on.

“I sent you a message in a bottle,” he says.

“It’s called a text,” she says, bending for a close mouthed kiss. When she pulls back he’s frowning.

“You used to smile when I said things like that.”

Emma puts the potatoes in the fridge, careful. “Things change,” she says.

//

Sometimes Emma thinks she might be crazy, sitting in a padded room in Boston or New York, staring at the wall, trapping in a fever dream. She’s seen those shows, where it turns out everything a figment of a character’s imagination. And this? A saviour princess with a Disney supporting cast? It’s everything every orphan dreams about, riding to a new house with their clothes in a black garbage back, sitting in class and hearing the other kids whisper behind them, lying in bed in the group home, waiting for sleep.

//

She’s almost hoping she’ll lose herself in the dagger, the black ribbons of the Dark One crawling across her skin, cocooning, trapping, devouring. A little peace sounds good. She should have known better--her whole life, the only thing she’s ever been good at is digging her heels in and fighting. She teleports to Henry’s castle and shakes in the sand, her knees drawn up to her chest. She can hear them calling to her, Snow and Killian, and then after a few hours, Henry: _Emma, Emma, Mom?_. She thinks about the way Regina says her name, biting and affectionate all at once, but she doesn’t hear her.

//

She takes the bus to Boston, her old haunts, dive bars and dirty back alleys, gets drunk and breaks a biker’s arm when he tries to follow her into the bathroom stall. She likes it, the thrill it gives her, the power, the clean snap of his bone and his pained, scared whimpers. She goes outside and torches his bike the old fashioned way, lighter and cloth and gasoline; she laughs when the flames leap, crackling, into the air.

She sleeps on a motel six bedspread and hears them, still calling her: _Emma, Emma, Emma_.

//

She smokes her way through two packs of cigarettes and hours of daytime television, reality court shows and reruns of soap operas. She leaves to visit the vending machine, comes back with a pack of pretzels and an eighth of pot, using her fingernail to pick out the tobacco in a cigarette and fill it with sweeter, heavier smoke. 

She turns her cellphone on and deletes the notifications, the voicemails without listening to the them, the texts without reading them. She calls Regina.

Regina picks up on the second ring, rushed and worried and relieved. “Emma,” Regina says like a prayer, raw emotion. 

“Is Henry okay?”

“Where are you?”

Emma’s anger spikes. “I asked about Henry.”

“He’s upset,” Regina says, and this is why Emma called her instead of Snow; Regina understands. “He wants to talk to you.”

“No!” Emma recoils, scooting back against the headboard. “I can’t. I--it’s best if I stay away.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Regina snaps, “get back here so we can help you.”

“It doesn’t work, does it?” Emma asks, dreamy and floating, the smooth high singing in her lungs. “You can’t use the dagger to call me if I’m not in Storybrooke.”

Regina is silent, and Emma knows she’s right. She laughs, and it starts relieved and takes on a cold, mocking edge. “Emma,” Regina says, pleading.

“Can’t make me,” Emma breathes, sing-song. “I’m free of all of you.”

“You don’t mean that,” Regina says, and Emma hangs up. She wants a drink.

//

She stays up too late and sleeps too much, burning out the last of her cash on motels and smokes and cheap whiskey. She feels like she’s a teenager again, run away for the hundredth time, and she misses Lily like a toothache, when hiding out felt like a vacation instead of a prison with thin invisible walls.

She thinks about Lily for the first time in years, remembers how it was sleeping in the same bed with someone for the first time, legs tangled in sheets, an arm over her waist, how Lily tasted like peach schnapps when they kissed, messy and inexperienced, too wet and chapped lips, the softness of her belly under Emma’s fumbling fingers.

//

Regina calls her four times a day, everyday. She doesn’t leave any voicemails.

//

Emma runs out of cash and sits at a bus station on the floor, nursing the coffee she spent her last dollar on. When it’s empty she spins the paper cup on the cement in front of her, letting her mind go flat and empty. She feels it under her skin, an itch she can’t scratch, burning. Someone drops change into her cup and she giggles--is that how bad she looks? She stumbles to the bathroom to look in the mirror and flinches away. Her skin is scaled in the mirror, glittering, and her reflection smiles like a shark.

She’s hungry.

//

She goes to a soup kitchen, feeling guilty and like a liar, and can’t wait in the line for a hot meal. A volunteer catches her outside, offers her water bottle. When Emma refuses the volunteer grabs her arm and Emma slams him against the brick walls of a church, snarling, alive for the first time since she left Maine, feeling the man’s pulse against her palm, fluttering and alive. She leans her weight until he’s choking, begging, sagging unconscious. Someone shouts and she drops him, still breathing, and flees.

She prowls the worst neighborhood she can find, beats three thugs unconscious, and it isn’t enough. It fades when she drops her hands and lets someone use their knuckles against her skin until they leave her slumped and gasping. Her blood is still red, and she licks it off her skin, sticky and metallic against her tongue. She swallows it down and laughs.

//

“Jesus wept,” Regina mutters, and drags her to a cab. 

//

She wakes up wrapped in coat that smells like classy perfume and her own haze of smoke. She sits up: boring hotel art on the walls, the hum of the air conditioner. Regina sits in a chair by the window, and looking at her is like a punch in the gut. She looks alive, glowing. Her lipstick is bright and her hair is dark and Emma wants her like an addict wants a hit; encompassing, derailing, destabilizing.

“You look terrible,” Regina says.

“You look alone,” Emma says, low and rough. Regina’s brow furrows faintly, catching something in Emma’s tone.

“Did you want me to bring the Charmings?”

“No.”

Regina points to the bathroom. “Can I interest you in a shower?”

Emma slides off the bed and feels graceful again, finally, a snake rolling across the floor. She wants to flick her tongue against Regina’s skin and taste it like air. 

“Miss Swan--” Emma leans over her, Regina coat falling to the ugly carpet, her hands bracketing the arms of the chair. She dips her head and drags her nose across Regina’s jaw, up to her hair. She smells like coconuts and lotion. “Channeling your inner dog?” Regina asks, cutting, but Emma’s close enough to see her pulse flutter in her throat.

“Don’t call me Miss Swan,” Emma says, and it’s soft but she can feel power humming in her fingertips. The dagger whispers to her, hundreds of miles away, and she aches to answer it.

Regina pushes her back with two fingers on her breastbone. “Go. Shower.” It’s a Queen’s voice, and Emma snarls but retreats, backing into the bathroom.

//

She sits in the shower until Regina jimmies the door open with a crowbar, splintering the wood. “That’s going on your bill,” she says, laying the crowbar on the sink with thunk of metal and stone. 

Emma stuffs a fist in her mouth and laughs around it, water going up her nose. Regina turns the spout off, droplets dampening the sleeves of her blouse, and throws one of the extra big fluffy towels over Emma. “Did you use soap?” Emma doesn’t answer and Regina sighs. “Don’t you want to know how I found you?”

“GPS in my cell phone,” Emma says dully. “Didn’t think you had it in you.”

“I was in Storybrooke for thirty years,” Regina calls out, walking into the other room. She comes back with a handful of clothes--Emma’s clothes. “I had time to discover technology.” Emma stands on shaky legs and sways, whispers in her ears.

Regina drags her eyes up Emma’s body while she dresses and Emma doesn’t feel anything except exhaustion, sunk deep in her bones.

//

Regina had driven up in her car, and Emma lays a hand on its faded yellow paint. It used to sing to her, freedom and love, and for a second she thinks about the good times with Neal, dreaming about a cookie cutter house in the suburbs, the first time she laid a hand on her belly and felt Henry move inside of her, the way his hair felt when she kissed him alive with all the love in her heart, more love than she’s ever managed to feel for herself. Then it fades and she slumps into the passenger seat, rolling the radio dial between her fingers.

There’s fast food wrappers in the footwell, like Regina hadn’t stopped driving to throw them away. 

//

They pull over for gas and Regina follows Emma when she says she has to go to the bathroom, like she doesn’t trust Emma not to vanish in a puff of smoke. She buys Emma cheesepuffs and orange soda and it tastes like ash on her tongue. 

//

Regina stops just before the town line, the spraypaint faded but still bright. “Emma,” she says.

Emma has her head leaned against the glass window. Her lips are cracked. She gets out, the door creaking, and feels the pull in her chest, where her heart thumps, dragging her back to Storybrooke. She wonders if it’s black yet, rotted from the inside out. She stops with her toes on the line. “I don’t know,” she says, and trails off, the thought lost.

“I don’t either,” Regina says. They stand for a moment and Emma listens to the wind in the trees. Then she walks back to the car, Regina behind her. She thumps the door shut and doesn’t bother to buckle her seatbelt. She presses her forehead against the window. When she speaks her breath blows out, fogging the glass.

“I’m not--” she says.

“You are.” Regina takes her hand, her fingers tight and scared and determined. “We’ll figure this out. Together.”

In the side mirror, Emma’s reflection pulls her heart out, bites the glowing center, smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> look something that isn't wayhaught! And my first swan queen. And last, probably. I gotta quit this show, it's no good for me. But I still kinda love their characters, fml. It was supposed to be something else, and longer, but I'm not feeling it anymore, so I hope it doesn't seem too fractured or unfinished. And Regina in particular is so hard to grasp.
> 
> thanks for reading! let me know if you enjoyed, and catch me on tumblr as pocketsmile


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